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In her youth, Yosano had not been allowed opportunities to interact with the opposite sex, which she cited as the cause for her latent sexuality. She was not allowed to leave her home unaccompanied and could count the number of times she had crossed the threshold of someone else's home. After being married she reflected negatively upon her childhood, saying, "I realized for the first time how jaundiced, unfair, and dark my childhood had been."
Tekkan was married when he met Akiko, and left his wife for her a year after they met one another. The two poets started a new life together in the suburb of Tokyo. They married in 1901, when Yosano was 23, and went on to have 13 children, 11 of whom lived to adulthood. Tekkan had extramarital affairs during their marriage, including with his ex-wife.
The majority are love poems through which Akiko expresses her feelings toward Tekkan Yosano. It was through this particular collection that she set an image for herself as well as the stage for female voices in modern Japan. The poems tended to express femininity in a manner unconventional for her time, especially from a female writer.
In traditional Japanese values, women are perceived as (and are expected to be) gentle and modest. The domestic and societal roles of Japanese women were and are focused on procreation and raising children, especially boys. Midaregami not only expressed concepts and/or issues that pertain to women and were not normally voiced in such a public manner, but also created a new, revolutionary image of womanhood, as lively, free, sexual, and assertive, nothing at all like the conventional picture of the modest, demure young lady expected in Japan. Yosano's women were not passive, but active agents of their love lives. In a typical tanka, Yosano wrote: "'Spring is short; what is there that has eternal life?' I said, and made his hands seek out my powerful breasts." The Midaregami posed a challenge to the patriarchal values of Japanese society, as well as to the accepted literary and cultural conventions of her time. Although Akiko Yosano's work was denounced and severely criticized, it served as a great source of inspiration to women of her day. The American scholar Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase noted, "The visual representations of flesh, lips and breasts symbolize women’s sexuality".
No poet had written of breasts in a tanka before, which led the poet Nobutsuna Sasaki to attack her in a magazine article for "corrupting public morals" and "mouthing obscenities fit for a whore".Steve Rabson "Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One's Life or Not: A Question of Which War" pages 45-74 from The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Volume 25, Issue 1, April 1991 page 47. From the examples in the Midaregami, the idea of nudity changed the way Japanese people viewed eroticism and female sexuality. Up until this point women's breasts were a symbol for child feeding and motherhood. From then on they began to take on a different representation; that of natural beauty, and especially that of young women. A door was opened for Japanese women to imagine new representations of sexuality and the female body.
Yosano helped to found what was originally a girls' school, the Bunka Gakuin (Institute of Culture), together with Nishimura Isaku, Kawasaki Natsu and others, and became its first dean and chief lecturer. She assisted many aspiring writers to gain a foothold in the literary world. She was a lifelong advocate of women's education. She also translated the Japanese classics into modern Japanese, including the Shinyaku Genji Monogatari (Newly Translated Tale of Genji) and Shinyaku Eiga Monogatari (Newly Translated Tale of Flowering Fortunes).
Yosano's poem Kimi Shinitamou koto nakare (君死にたもうこと勿れ, Thou Shalt Not Die), addressed to her younger brother, was published in Myōjō during the height of the Russo-Japanese War and was extremely controversial.James L. McClain, Japan: A Modern History p 427 Made into a song, it was used as a mild form of anti-war protest, as the number of Japanese casualties from the bloody Siege of Port Arthur became public. In September 1904, Yosano had learned that Japanese soldiers at Port Arthur were being used as "human bullets", being strapped with explosives and sent to blast holes through the Russian barbed wire entanglements in suicide missions.Steve Rabson "Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One's Life or Not: A Question of Which War" pages 45-74 from The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Volume 25, Issue 1, April 1991 page 45. Yosano's younger brother was serving in the Imperial Army and attached to the forces besieging Port Arthur. In Bushido, it was the highest honor for a man to die for the Emperor, and knowing of her brother's impulsive nature, Yosano was seized with the fear that he might volunteer to be a "human bullet", inspiring her to write a poem pleading with him to think of his widowed mother.Steve Rabson "Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One's Life or Not: A Question of Which War" pages 45-74 from The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Volume 25, Issue 1, April 1991 pages 45-46.
Addressed to her brother, Yosano wrote: "Did our parents make you grasp the sword and teach you to kill? For you what does it matter whether the fortress of Lüshun Port falls or not?"Louise Young (historian) Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998 page 84. Yosano attacked the central concept of Bushido in the Kimi, noting that it was the greatest honor for a man to die for the Emperor, who she sarcastically noted never put himself in harm's way, expecting others to die for him.Steve Rabson "Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One's Life or Not: A Question of Which War" pages 45-74 from The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Volume 25, Issue 1, April 1991 page 50. For calling the war with Russian Empire senseless and stupid, Yosano made herself into Japan's most controversial poet, and the government attempted to ban her poem. The Kimi was so unpopular that Yosano's house was stoned by angry people while she became involved in a rancorous debate with the journalist over the question of whether poets had the duty to support the war or not.Steve Rabson "Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One's Life or Not: A Question of Which War" pages 45-74 from The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Volume 25, Issue 1, April 1991 page 46.
The first issue of the literary journal Seito in September 1911 featured her poem "The Day the Mountains Move" asking for woman to be given equal rights.Steve Rabson "Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One's Life or Not: A Question of Which War" pages 45-74 from The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Volume 25, Issue 1, April 1991 page 48. In a 1918 article, Yosano attacked "the ruling and military class which deliberately block the adoption of a truly moral system in an effort to protect the wealth and influence of their families...They hurry to invoke the power and precepts of the old totalitarian moral codes to direct the lives of Japanese citizens". Yosano ended her article by calling militarism a form of "barbarian thinking which is the responsibility of us women to eradicate from our midst".
Yosano gave birth to 13 children, of whom 11 survived to adulthood. The late Japanese politician Kaoru Yosano was one of her grandsons.
This viewpoint was diametrically opposed to many Japanese feminists' shared opinion at the time that the government should financially support mothers, including one of the five founders of Seitō, Raichō Hiratsuka. Raichō criticized this, saying that most women cannot realistically live without financial assistance.
"Akiko had, in effect, redefined the meaning of the term and seized it as a tool of liberation. "Chastity" no longer meant safeguarding the womb; it meant the totality of a woman's sexuality, the totality of the female self, the chastity of the self. Akiko saw that the emphasis on woman as sexual object and her acceptance of that definition had had a stultifying effect on her sense of self".
This was written in response to Swedish feminist Ellen Key and Leo Tolstoy in her Taiyō magazine column, "One Woman's Notebook," in January 1915. Her main assertion is that women could accept roles as mothers, but exemplified more than that role: as friends, as wives, as Japanese citizens, and as members of the world.
Yosano believed that motherhood is something that shouldn't be controlled by the government, as even in a feminist light, there is no real difference from living for a man. She believed that marriage and life should be done cooperatively, and that living with one gender over the other would have “tragic consequences” for all involved.
In her poem "Citizens of Japan, A Morning Song" published in June 1932, Yosano embraced Bushido as she praised a Japanese soldier for dying for the Emperor at the First Battle of Shanghai as she described how the soldier "scatters" his body when he is blown apart as a "human bomb". Yosano called the "scattered" body of the soldier "purer than a flower, giving life to a samurai's honor". Unlike the Kimi, Yosano called for Japanese women to "unify in loyalty" for the "cause of the Emperor's forces". The American scholar Steven Robson noted that unlike the Kimi, which like the rest of Yosano's early poetry was extremely innovative, Citizens of Japan is cliche-ridden as Yosano used well-known phrases like "a samurai's honor" taken straight from the ultra-nationalist press without developing a vocabulary of her own.Steve Rabson "Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One's Life or Not: A Question of Which War" pages 45-74 from The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Volume 25, Issue 1, April 1991 page 59. Yosano ended her poem by praising Bushido, declaring that the "purest" act a Japanese man could perform was to die for the Emperor in battle and urged the Kwantung Army forward onward in the conquest of Manchuria "through suffering a hundredfold" to "smash the sissified dreams of compromise".Louise Young (historian) Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998 page 84.
Yosano's poems from 1937 onward support the war against China, and in 1941, she supported Pacific War against the United States and the United Kingdom. Her late commentaries in the early Showa years tended to praise militarism, and also promoted her feminist viewpoints. Her final work, Shin Man'yōshū (New Man'yōshū, 1937–39) was a compilation of 26,783 poems by 6,675 contributors, written over a 60-year period.
In 1942, in one of her last poems, Yosano praised her son who was serving as a lieutenant in the Imperial Navy, urging him to "fight bravely" for the Hirohito in "this sacred war".Steve Rabson "Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One's Life or Not: A Question of Which War" pages 45-74 from The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Volume 25, Issue 1, April 1991 page 62. Yosano died of a stroke in 1942 at the age of 63. Her death, occurring in the middle of the Pacific War, went almost unnoticed in the press, and after the end of the war, her works were largely forgotten by critics and the public. In the 1950s, the Kimi was made mandatory reading in Japanese high schools, and during the protests led by idealistic university students against the government of Nobusuke Kishi, whose intention was to do away with Article 9 of the constitution, the Kimi became something of an anthem for the students.Steve Rabson "Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One's Life or Not: A Question of Which War" pages 45-74 from The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Volume 25, Issue 1, April 1991 pages 46-47. Her romantic, sensual style has come back into popularity in recent years, and she has an ever-increasing following. Her grave is at Tama Cemetery in Fuchu, Tokyo.
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